Using ITIL to Build a Successful Capacity Management Process

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Using ITIL to Build a Successful Capacity

Management Process

Neil McMenemy

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Agenda

• ITIL Capacity Management – Strengths

• Framework – Interfaces to Other Processes • Continual Service Improvement Plan

• Building a Capacity Management Process • ITIL 3

• ITIL Self Assessment

• Improving the Capacity Management Self Assessment • Summary

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ITIL Capacity Management – Strengths

• Although we can show that there are some weaknesses and omissions from ITIL Capacity Management it does have considerable strengths

• The fact that it sits within a framework is important

• Capacity Management is within Service Delivery which itself is part of IT Service Management (ITSM) and has appropriate interfaces to the processes within these

• Service Delivery’s and ITSM’s position within IT is defined, as are the other disciplines that encompass IT

• ITIL encourages the attainment of high quality IT Services through a

Continuous Service Improvement Programme, the considerations of which tie-in to creating effective processes

• Although ITIL may not be perfect, it has been adopted by many

organisations as a way of being compared to best practice and there are user groups and self assessment data that can be used to ease the path towards it

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ITIL Capacity Management – Strengths

Capacity Management within Service Delivery

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ITIL Capacity Management – Strengths

Service Delivery with Service Management within IT

T h e B u s i n e s s T h e T e c h n o l o g y The Business Perspective Service Management ICT Infrastructure Management Planning to Implement Service Management

Application Management Service Delivery Service Support Software Asset Management Security Management

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Framework - Interfaces to Other Processes

• It is clear from the IT Service Management diagram that there are some working interfaces between Capacity Management and other ITIL ITSM processes

• These interfaces, whether direct or indirect should form a part of the Capacity Management process

• In practice these interfaces often exist in an informal, ad-hoc way but they need to be documented and formalised

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Continual Service Improvement Plan (CSIP)

• Long-term Programme • Organisational Structure

• Size

• Business/IT

• Processes can be shared between functional groups • Authority for IT management

• Support from business management • Service Culture

• Understand the customer view • Why are services being provided? • Have targets and aim to progress • Defined Supporting Processes

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Building a Capacity Management Process - Process Definition

• The items needed, from whom, when and based on what criteria • The items to be produced, who receives them and based on what

requirements

• The linkages to other sets of activities that may be critical to

performance and capacity activities, (i.e. configuration information, budget planning, etc.)

• The single individual with enough authority to be responsible for making sure things work the way they should

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Building a Capacity Management Process - Process Model

Process Requirements / Supplier Inputs Customer Requirements / Process Outputs

Measurements – Process control information and reports to highlight where efficiency and effectiveness can be improved

Process Ownership – Defined and communicated

Objective – In terms of results, measurements and benefits

Suppliers

Inputs

Customers

Outputs Sub processes – These identify the major activities

which should be performed in order to meet the process objective

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Building a Capacity Management Process - Benefits of Employing ‘Best Practice’ Capacity Management

•Improved business satisfaction and communications

•Business and IT partnership in solving IT service issues •Realistic business volume estimates leading to more accurate plans

•Periodic and consistent feedback to business areas

•Capacity status reports •Capacity impact studies •Improved quality of service delivery to

business areas

•More than 70% of "fire-fighting“ time eliminated.

•Proactive capacity tracking, monitoring and forecasting •Redirect crisis energies onto business

issues

•Costly application rollouts on-time achieving planned service levels •Planned project benefits received earlier; penalties avoided

•Collect and analyse capacity information at each project phase •Forecasts based on current application design and business volume information

•Timely rollout of application changes with minimal disruption

•10-15% reduction of server capacity •3-9 month deferral of upgrades without compromise in quality of service delivery •Workload re-balancing

•Workload optimisation

•Better timing of application rollouts

•Plans built with 6-12 months advance notice of requirements and changes

•Hardware acquisition deferrals

•5-10% lower acquisition cost due to better timing and volume purchases •More accurate capacity plans giving more lead time for negotiation

with suppliers •Lower acquisition costs

Manifestation of Results Realised Through

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Building a Capacity Management Process - Interfaces to Other Processes

Evaluates emerging technologies and develops plans for inclusion of new technologies Technology Planning

Develops strategic plans for the company including strategic IT plans to match the business objectives

Strategic Planning

Manages service levels committed to the clients Service Level Management

Provides the methodologies for managing projects and enforces the use of those methodologies

Project Management

Recommends the best financial alternative to meet a client's need for IT resources and administers the purchase/lease of equipment and services

Procurement

Manages reporting, tracking, and resolution of IT problems Problem Management

Plans the physical installation of IT resources, installs, tests, and maintains the equipment

Facilities Management

Determines the procedures, facilities, equipment, and configurations needed to recover from outages or disasters

Business Continuity Planning

Develops detailed designs of hardware and software configurations including tracking the IT inventory

Configuration Management

Applies service rates to IT resources to determine costs and charges the users Chargeback

Tracks and manages changes to the production environment Change Management

Converts individual plans into financial terms and identifies how funds will be obtained and allocated.

Budget Planning

Manages the availability of hardware, software, network, and facilities. Availability Management

Description Process

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Building a Capacity Management Process - Process

Ownership

• Single person responsible for the process execution and results • Solicits participation from other functions

• Owner must be senior, i.e. must have sufficient authority and position in organisation to allow the process to work

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Building a Capacity Management Process - Roles, Responsibilities and Skills

• Roles

• Set of tasks to be performed in support of a process activity

• Not a description of an individual, job or department but what needs to be done

• For example:

• “The Capacity Planner manages the production of the enterprise-wide capacity plan”

• Responsibilities

• Specify HOW the role is carried out • For example:

• “Collects and analyses the business plan and development plans for Service xyz”

• Skills

• Required based on the roles and responsibilities • For example:

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Building a Capacity Management Process - Activities

• Activities are what need to be done to execute the process • Capacity and Performance activities may be:

• Measure business volumes • Measure resource utilisation • Gather business driver growth

• Model business volumes to resource utilisation

• Evaluate hardware configurations given forecasted growth • Activities consist of many tasks

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Building a Capacity Management Process - Tasks

• Tasks are the steps required to accomplish the activity • An example is given here:

Task Description

1.1 Review budget policy, business objectives, technology pathways.

1.2 Obtain IT growth estimates (previously translated from business growth requirements)

1.3 …

1.4 …

1.5 …

1.6 Produce options for capacity solutions based on previous steps

Activity 1

Evaluate hardware configurations given forecasted growth

Gather the business objectives, service requirements, technology pathways and application and workload growth projections. Be aware of the policies surrounding the budget

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Building a Capacity Management Process - Activity Measurements and Process Improvement Metrics

• Activity Measurement – used for managing and evaluating the process

• Very detailed • For example:

• The percentage of service lines with defined capacity drivers

• Process Improvement Metrics – only in place after the process has been allowed to “settle in”

• Effectiveness – “% of time response time goals met” • Efficiency – “average cost of producing capacity plan”

• Adaptability – ability to accommodate change “% of changes requested that are completed”

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Stop Press – ITIL 3 “The Capacity Management Process”

Review current capacity & performance

Improve current service & component

capacity

Plan new capacity

Capacity & performance

reports & data Assess, agree &

document new requirements & capacity Forecasts Capacity Plan Capacity Management Information System (CMIS)

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ITIL 3 “Capacity Management sub-processes”

Review current capacity & performance

Improve current service & component

capacity

Plan new capacity

Capacity & performance

reports & data

Assess, agree & document new requirements & capacity Forecasts Capacity Plan Capacity Management Information System (CMIS) Service Portfolio Business Requirements Business Capacity Management Service Capacity Management Component Capacity Management SLA/SLR IT service _design

Capacity Management Tools

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ITIL 3 – Tasks and Activities

• Business Capacity Management • Assist with agreeing SLAs

• Design, procure or amend service configuration • Verify SLA

• Support SLA negotiation

• Control and Implementation • Component Capacity Management

• Tuning and optimisation • Utilisation monitoring

• Response time monitoring • Modelling and trending…

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ITIL Self-Assessment

• Level 1: Pre-requisites

• Level 1.5: Management Intent • Level 2: Process Capability • Level 2.5: Internal Integration • Level 3: Products

• Level 3.5: Quality Control

• Level 4: Management Information • Level 4.5: External Integration

• Level 5: Customer Interface

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Improving the Capacity Management Self Assessment

• ITIL is ‘best practice’ and the self assessment is very black and white – the organisation is either compliant or it isn’t

• In reality everything is a shade of grey

• We need to be able to measure

to what extent

an organisation is compliant

• Reduce the number of questions • Increase the number of answers

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Improving the Capacity Management Self Assessment

12. Are services detailed in SLA’s monitored, measured and growth/performance predicted? (Level 2: Process Capability)

• That’s four different questions

• The answers could be different for different services

16. Do you model systems behaviour under various workloads and provide tuning recommendations? (Level 2: Process Capability)

• These two things are quite disparate and should not be together

19. Are end-to-end service response times monitored? (Level 2: Process Capability)

• For how many services/platforms…?

• Are the response times split per platform?

• Are the response times split by component (CPU, CPU wait, I/O, I/O queue…)?

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Improving the Capacity Management Self Assessment

28. Do you maintain a Capacity Plan? (Level 3: Products)

• For how many services/platforms…?

36. Does the organisation have suitable tools to support capacity management activities? (Level 3.5: Quality Control)

• Should be split by activity – monitoring, modelling. • Or split by platform/service.

• What is a suitable tool? Microsoft Excel?

• If the activities are carried out do we need to ask about tools?

• If they’re not carried out why not (its probably not lack of sufficient tools)?

Level 4: Management Information (Q 37-43) – Does Capacity Management provide information regarding…?

• For how many services/platforms…? • To whom?

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Improving the Capacity Management Self Assessment

Level 4.5: External Integration (Q 44-53) – Does Capacity Management exchange information with…?

• For how many services/platforms…? • Is the relationship formalised?

• Is it sufficient?

Level 5: Customer Interface (Q54-58) – Questions don’t differentiate between customers.

• Some customers may not be defined

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Improving the Capacity Management Self Assessment

• A short self assessment aimed at adding more value has been developed

• It allows organisations to answer

to what extent

they do recommended activities

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Improving the Capacity Management Self Assessment

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Improving the Capacity Management Self Assessment

• A self assessment is not intended to give a complete, detailed version of events

• Although internal audits can create the motivation to make improvements they tend to be about looking for evidence that proves the organisation did something at least once

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Improving the Capacity Management Self Assessment

4.8 6.5

6.5 10.0

Business Volume Forecasts - Overall Overall

4.6 6.5

6.5 10

Split by Type (e.g. Product) D

4.8 6

6 10

Granularity matches resource utilisation forecast requirements C 4.8 6 6 10

Period matches resource utilisation forecast requirements B 5.0 7.5 7.5 10

Collected for all Applications A Average (All) Best Reviewed (Overall) Best Reviewed (per category) Best Practice Name 4.8 6.5 6.5 10.0

Business Volume Forecasts - Overall Overall

4.6 6.5

6.5 10

Split by Type (e.g. Product) D

4.8 6

6 10

Granularity matches resource utilisation forecast requirements C 4.8 6 6 10

Period matches resource utilisation forecast requirements B 5.0 7.5 7.5 10

Collected for all Applications A Average (All) Best Reviewed (Overall) Best Reviewed (per category) Best Practice Name

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Improving the Capacity Management Self Assessment

Business Volume Forecasts

0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45

Best Practice Best Reviewed (per category)

Best Reviewed (Overall)

Average (All) Customer ABC

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Summary

• ITIL has some strengths, use the framework and other organisations’ experiences

• Follow the ITIL suggestion of a Continual Service Improvement Plan • Define the requirements, responsibilities and deliverables

• Carry out a self-assessment to understand where you are now • Consider an independent assessment (no “baggage”)

• When the process is in place, re-assess (either self or independent) and issue customer satisfaction surveys (choose customers carefully) • Do you really need to attain “best practice”